The Hindu : Bush camp sets aims high

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 25, 2003

International

International

Bush camp sets aims high

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON JUNE 24. The U.S. President, George W. Bush, took his anti-terrorism message to New York but was careful not to mention the attacks of September 11, 2001 in his fundraising that brought his campaign an additional $4 millions.

Between the President and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who participated in fundraisings in Virginia and Massachussetts, the total collection for Monday was about $5.7 millions. And between now and the Republican Convention in New York in September 2004, the Bush campaign is expected to raise at least $170 millions. But privately, many members of the Grand Old Party believe that $200 millions figure is not unbeatable.

Aides to Mr. Bush have been regularly making the point that the President needs every dollar he can get to meet the `challenge' of the Democratic Pack of Nine who are seen going the extra mile to discredit or challenge every one of the President's domestic or foreign policies.

But the fact is that Mr. Bush has no serious challenge from within the Republican Party and finds himself in a position that his predecessor, Bill Clinton, was in the Democratic Party in the run up to the re-election of 1996. The Bush campaign has so far raked in about $12 millions in one week of fund raising; and the $4 millions in New York is passed off as the record for a single event in a Presidential campaign.

The money raised in New York is especially impressive because the city is strongly Democratic even if it has a Republican Mayor and the State, a Republican Governor. The President told his supporters in New York that terrorists "declared war on the United States of America; and war is what they got.."

Speaking at the fundraiser several blocks away from Ground Zero, Mr. Bush was careful not to speak specifically of the events of September 11, 2001. Aides have said that they will not use that as campaign material. "We have captured or killed many leaders of the Al-Qaeda and the rest of them know we're hot on their trail," the President said and pointing out that two countries — Afghanistan and Iraq — which were terror havens have seen the governments toppled. "Fifty million people in those two countries once lived under tyranny, and now they live in freedom," the President remarked.

`Enemy combatant'

Meanwhile, on the subject of terrorism, the President has also made a determination that a native of Qatar who has been held for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation is to be designated as an "enemy combatant" and hence be handed over to the Defence Department. Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri who has been in the custody of the Justice Department is now in a Defence Department facility in Charleston, South Carolina.

Al Marri is the third person to be designated as an enemy combatant and is the first non-American citizen to be re-classified. The new designation gives the Federal Government the power to try and sentence terrorism suspects in secret and under tough rules that would limit constitutional rights such as appeal.

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